Happy Ash Wednesday As I mentioned in an Of Many Things column a few years ago an in an NPR piece my Lenten sacrifices come to me from a Jewish friend named Rob with whom I roomed in college and his family At the time my mostly Jewish friends meaning that most of my friends were Jewish n

Not of the Washington but of the Los Angeles sort In a few days the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress will set sail yet again with tens of thousands of Catholics and friends on board for music workshops lectures panels liturgy and all manner of Catholic revelry and reverie In the

The President addresses a joint session of Congress for the first time tonight Despite the lack of Republican support for his stimulus bill and the churlish and I suspect risky refusal of some GOP governors to receive some of the federal money in that bill look for President Obama to continue to

In case you missed The Colbert Report last night here s a conversation about vocation the vow of poverty and an unusual new image of God James Martin S J

The Church in New York and indeed all of America rejoices this morning at the announcement that Pope Benedict XVI has named Archbishop Timothy Michael Dolan to be the next Archbishop of New York I have never seen Archbishop Dolan that he didn rsquo t have his arm around someone We first met in R

Paul Elie s superb Atlantic Monthly essay on the Archbishop of Canterbury includes an anecdote about Dr Williams joking that he should have worn a T-shirt with the words GRAVELY DEFICIENT on it to visit the then head of the Vatican s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith CDF Cardinal Rat